Anyone who has read Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House will find a couple of details of its 1959 reception almost too neat to be true. Jackson had been writing novels and stories for nearly two decades before embarking on her tale of Hill House, a mansion set under a hill where visitors can turn up any time they like but find it rather harder to leave. These earlier works were striking, wrote Jackson’s biographer Ruth Franklin a couple of years ago, not only because they were such accomplished contributions to the strain of American gothic that includes Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe and Henry James, but because they foregrounded women – single women desperate for the social acceptance of marriage, or married women trapped in domestic situations so stifling they were (often malevolent) characters in their own right. Jackson herself was increasingly desperate in her marriage and in the imposed role of homemaker.
The Haunting of Hill House was her first book to earn its advance, and more: Franklin notes that Jackson used the surplus to pay off her mortgage. It was optioned, and then filmed by Robert Wise, who had just finished making West Side Story and would go on to make The Sound of Music; Jackson used that money to remodel her house, buying sheets in such vivid colours that the small Vermont town in which she lived remembered them for years. The book was a finalist for a National book award along with novels by Saul Bellow, John Updike and Philip Roth (who won with Goodbye, Columbus) – writers who became household names synonymous with seriousness, while Jackson’s oeuvre was dismissed as middlebrow thrills, skilfully produced by a housewife who, unhelpfully to herself, sometimes claimed to be an amateur witch. Shortly after The Haunting of Hill House was published, Jackson became so ill with agoraphobia and colitis that she barely made it to the premiere of the film in 1963. “I have written myself into the house,” she said to a friend, and it was true in many more ways than one.
I brought a friend with me the first time I saw Princess Mononoke in an American movie theater. He had no experience with Miyazaki or with Japanese culture or animation, but he was intrigued to see what promised to be a grand adventure story, especially one that was appearing in the United States under the auspices of Disney. In the middle of watching the movie, however, he started nudging me. “Who’s the good guy?” he hissed irritably. “I can’t tell which is the good guy and which is the bad guy!” “That’s the whole point!” I whispered back.
Princess Mononoke inaugurated a new chapter in Miyazakiworld. Ambitious and angry, it expressed the director’s increasingly complex worldview, putting on film the tight intermixture of frustration, brutality, animistic spirituality, and cautious hope that he had honed in his manga Nausicaä. The film offers a mythic scope, unprecedented depictions of violence and environmental collapse, and a powerful vision of the sublime, all within the director’s first-ever attempt at a jidaigeki, or historical film. It also moves further away from the family fare that had made him a treasured household name in Japan.
My first real memory may very well be the opening scene from Star Wars: A New Hope, in which, after the floating text tells us the world is at war, Darth Vader and his stormtroopers seize Princess Leia’s ship. While rebel soldiers line the hallways, stormtroopers blast open the air-locked door and begin firing lasers. A moment later, Vader comes through with his black mask and heavy breath, cape sweeping the ground behind him, and sometime after that we see lightsabers and landspeeders, X-wing and Tie-fighters, the Millennium Falcon and the Death Star, and I’ll say now “ignite” is too weak a word to apply to what that movie did to my imagination.
Suddenly we were all looking at the stars, wondering what went on above our heads. Or we were arguing if lightsabers were real, if we could learn to use the force to move things with our minds or convince our mothers to take us swimming if she said no the first time. I still wonder, occasionally, when I’ve left a light on after climbing into bed, if I couldn’t just turn it off with the wave of a hand.
Imagine working as a server during brunch at a busy restaurant, walking up to a table of six, and being unable to say your name. Putting an order in at the bar, stuttering on half of the drinks, and being laughed at by your coworkers — again. Shuffling through a list of synonyms in your mind all day to avoid words starting with the letter “W” (“water” is out; so is “waiter”). Losing shifts because of the way you talk.
“I remember I was serving a table, a family,” says Avital Masri, a server who’s worked in Gainesville, Florida, and at Hillstone in New York City, “and every time I stuttered the dad would throw something back at me, or mock me, or repeat it to me. He would say, ‘Why are you saying it like that? Is there something wrong with the food?’ At a certain point I was like, ‘No, sir, I stutter, and this is just the way that I talk,’ but he still didn’t let up.”
Bekonscot is the oldest continuously open miniature village in the world. Almost 16 million people have visited since 1929, and about 15,000 call in each month. In an age of Netflix, Fortnite and artificial intelligence, we may regard it as remarkable that such a thing has not only endured, but thrived and even expanded. How can one possibly explain the appeal? Nostalgia, certainly, but there are numerous bigger, shinier miniature worlds that Bekonscot has inspired – what about them? Is there something else at play? Something utopian perhaps, or something darker for our troubled and unstable times?
The American writer Virginia Faulkner (1913-1980) did not care for bores. She had a method, at the table, for dealing with them. “I ask the gentleman on my right, ‘Are you a bed-wetter?’” she wrote, “and when we have exhausted that, I remark to the gentleman on my left, ‘You know, I spit blood this morning.’”
There is nothing like blood to grab the attention, as anyone who has found some in their urine will testify. The estimable British journalist Rose George has now written an entire, very good book about what Goethe called this “amiable juice.” Its title, “Nine Pints,” refers to how much blood the typical human body contains. If you give blood, which she highly recommends you do, you will still have eight, until your body self-replenishes.